With development of communications technologies, International Mobile Telecommunications-Advanced (IMT-Advanced) technologies pose a very high requirement for system capacity. Supporting a high-capacity and large-bandwidth frequency spectrum, however, brings both a large path loss and a large penetration loss of a frequency band. To meet the capacity requirement of the IMT-Advanced, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has put forward an LTE-Advanced system which uses a relay technology as one of candidate technologies to be researched for improving system capacity and coverage.
The relay technology is to add one or more relay nodes (RN) on a radio link between a donor Node B (DeNB) and a user equipment (UE), so that a radio signal between the DeNB and the UE is forwarded once or multiple times to implement replacement of a link of poor quality with two or more links of good quality so as to obtain higher link capacity and better coverage.
Currently, an RN supports two relay link modes: out-of-band relay, in which a relay link and an access link operate on different carriers; and in-band relay, in which the relay link and the access link operate on a same carrier. In-band relay is further classified into two types: in-band half-duplex (HD), in which there is no very strong interference isolation between a receive antenna and a transmit antenna, performance of a duplexer is not good, and a transceiver cannot perform simultaneous transmitting and receiving; and in-band full-duplex (FD), in which there is very strong interference isolation between the receive antenna and the transmit antenna, or performance of the duplexer is good, and the transceiver can perform simultaneous transmitting and receiving. That is, the relay node supports the preceding relay types.
In the prior art, an operator manually and statically configures an RN type at a network management system back-end of the RN when deploying and installing the RN. When the RN is powered on, an indication of the configured RN type is informed through signaling to a DeNB, so that the DeNB determines configuration information of the RN according to this indication.
In the existing method for statically configuring a relay type, reconfiguration or replacement of an RN is caused when a DeNB in a position where the RN is located has changed or when a RN deployed around is added or removed. Therefore, an operating cost for configuring the RN is high and configuration efficiency is low.